Geonovast

Certainly, having the larger diameter tanks will help you. When you're designing a spacecraft, you need to work backwards. For something like this, you would design a craft that can, from a Munar orbit, land, take off, get back into orbit, then do the burn to get back to Kerbin. Needs, say, 1500-1600 m/s of dV. Then you need to design your transfer stage, essentially just fuel tanks and an engine, that will push you from Kerbin orbit to the Mun, and get your Munar orbit injection. I'd give it 1200-1300 m/s of dV. Then you take that, attached to your landing/return craft, and build the booster capable of getting that to orbit. Usually around 3400 m/s of dV in that. At the Mun's surface, you'll need about 900 m/s of dV to get back home. I just landed with 2 m/s to spare. Not 2,000, Not 200, 2. Jeb's.... ok with it, somehow. *Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert at this game, but I'd like to think I'm pretty good by now. This is a huge deficit, and I don't think any amount of more efficient flying will get you the extra dV needed for the return. As far as what dV is, here's a recent discussion. All the fancy boxes in the following screenshots are from a mod called KER, which tells you every number you could possibly need for your rocket, and more. I've become quite accustomed to it, it's very nice to have. Best basic uses I get out of it are per stage dV, TWR (thrust to weight ratio, tells you if your rocket has enough thrust to get off the ground), and ap/pe readouts.... which are really nice to have in flight so you don't have to keep checking map view to know how high you're going to get. One other thing you may consider is enabling advanced tweakables, and setting fuel flow priority on the tanks. This can 1) remove the yellow fuel lines, and 2) allow you to drain the tanks bottom to top, which will help with stability and let you trash those giant, draggy fins. Higher number drains first. This is another reason why you want the boosters on the N/S sides. Much less chance of collision: 2 m/s left! I don't think I've ever had a closer landing... maybe. Well, I wanted to talk to you about that too. I think you overdid the panels. The original 3 panel setup you had before should be just fine. Your control issues were signal related, I'm sure. Not power related. I'll take a look at your new rocket.

Well, I found something that might help with stability. One, turning the rocket 90 degrees is going to help a lot, especially when you decouple the boosters. When you're only running two boosters, you want them on the "right" and "left" of the rocket. So if you're heading East (which you almost always will be), then you'll want the boosters on the north and south sides of the rocket. Also the boosters weren't centered on the decouplers, which could cause control issues on launch. I'm flying your rocket with the two issues above fixed, and I can tell you straight out - there is not enough gas to land on the Mun and come back. There's really only enough to get there and land.

Inside the folder that you installed KSP to (If you have Steam it's going to depend on what operating system you're using), there is a folder called "game". Inside "game" is "saves". Inside "saves" is a folder with the same name as your game save. Inside there is "Ships", inside "Ships" is "VAB". Inside "VAB" is a file with your ship's name. You'll need to upload that to a file sharing site, I use Google Drive. Make sure any permissions it might have is set to public, and post the link here. Eck, Ninja'd by @qzgy

Well, what I built doesn't. It's roughly 400 m/s dV shy of getting back to munar orbit and then back to Kerbin. Would you mind uploading your actual rocket's .craft file? I'll see if I can find a @Snarkian explanation of what dV is as he has a knack for explaining things to beginners.

Haha, it's alright. I've done my fair share of facepalm worthy things in this game. The fins do add stability. But if you're careful enough, you can get the rocket to orbit without them. Having them there adds weight and drag, which means you use more fuel to get to orbit. I may have been wrong about the rocket not being able to return. It looks like there's enough left in the rocket after I get to orbit to not only transfer to the Mun, but also get to orbit and start the decent. That might, might leave enough for the landing and return. Once I'm done, I'll repeat and get some good screenshots. I'm sorry, I do not have discord. Do you understand the concept of dV?

Ok, soooo.... Parachutes need air to work. There's no air on the Mun! So we can ditch those. I'm also fairly certain those giant fins on the bottom aren't needed. Testing your rocket now...

I've started to piece your ship together. I'm not using 1.5 yet, so I'm having a little bit of an issue with the new tank textures, but from what I'm seeing now, your ship simply does not have enough fuel to land on the Mun and return. Also a little confused. You have parachutes on the Science Jr. but you also have a heat shield and decoupler under the pod. What's your plan for re-entry?

Well, landing and taking off again is going to get expensive as far as fuel goes. It's pretty much why the Apollo program left an orbiter around the Moon and only half the lander came back up. Not that you have to do it that way, it's certainly possible to build a ship in this game that can land, take off, and come back to Kerbin without shedding any parts. Can you post some pictures of your craft? Let's see what we have to work with.

Communications network. Kerbin has a some pretty good antennas, but they can't send signals through planets. And if the antenna on your ship is really weak, it will lose contact with Kerbin shortly after you leave LKO. So basically you need satellites to relay the signals, and bigger antennas on your ships, if you're not sending a pilot. You're losing control of your ships because they can no longer talk to Kerbin. Your scientist doesn't know what to do, and there's no signal for the controllers on Kerbin to tell it what to do. Be careful, though, not all antennas will relay signals. The ones that do specifically say relay on them. To set up an efficient network, you'll need to set them up using a resonant orbit calculator. That's getting advanced, and is usually only used later in the career. Right now you might be able to get away with a bigger antenna and a low end relay.

Welcome to the forum, @Interstellar Yeet! It's also possible you're sending a craft with a kerbal, who isn't a pilot. You'll run into the same issues as a probe core without a signal back to Kerbin. If you're in early career and hanging outside of LKO (Low Kerbin Orbit), make sure you've got a Comm network set up that can handle the distance and LOS (Line Of Sight) problems, or just stick a pilot in the pod. Which, until you hire more kerbals, will be Valentina or Jebediah. Bill's a fine wrench-turner and Bob is pretty good with Microscopes, but neither of them can pilot their way out of a box.

If you right click on the part, is there a button that says "Run Test"? I've had contracts that wouldn't complete with staging, but the Run Test button did it. It can be tricky to get the alt and speed right at the same time. If you believe you've fulfilled the contract and it's just not popping for you, you can complete it using the Debugging menu. Alt + F12 on Windows, Right Shift + F12 on Linux, something + F12 on Mac. Also, welcome to the forums, @DoctorHoon!

Everyone knows someone who's just letting it happen. Remember kids, ask your friends and family how they're doing, even when everything seems to be ok.

What operating system are you on? On Linux it's Right Shift + F12

Stability. Purity. There's plenty of reasons. When they stop adding stuff to the game is when the game dies.

You'll always be welcome here, @monstah. I've certainly missed having you around.

Bandsaw, then. Whatever.

You could have turned it into a spork with a pair of scissors.

From what I can tell, that specific board will support an Ivy Bridge, but you likely need to update the bios first.

@royying If you're buying this computer primarily for KSP, go with the i5 as KSP's performance is mostly affected by single thread performance. KSP can use multiple threads, but you'll be using one most of the time. I also recommend getting a discrete GPU. Doesn't have to be fancy, but taking that load off the CPU does help quite a bit.

All good things come to those who wait! Have some patience, sometimes it takes a little while for someone with the answer to come along. I second and third KJR up there. It's vital. I will not play without it. I haven't tried it with 1.5.x yet, but I don't believe I had any issues in 1.3.x or 1.4.x.

This guy has what you're after. I agree, I'd be amazed if we ever saw this in stock, but this insanely awesome mod has LF generators.

What was it? Might help someone in the future.

Is it a career save? Do you have to unlock the launch sites in career? (Actually asking - I don't know) I know you can disable them in the difficulty settings, but I think default is set to on. Do you have the same issue in Sandbox (If it's a career)?

It does have two dependencies, but they're very light and they're nothing that actually affects your gameplay, they're just required for all of LGG's mods. I really like AGX.

I see happen consistently for one particular user.